Which is, as it turns out, the one thing they can change. The one thing that must change first.
We walk around with the cripplingly false idea that we must adjust how things are, as opposed to adjusting how we are and how we see them. This world might as well be a damn hall of mirrors. Rather than trying to break them all to distort and rearrange how you see the image, you have to let go of the idea that your image is all that exists.
The things that torture us and the negative patterns that follow us and the reason we have to keep making the same resolutions year after year is that we are not making the shift, we are trying to shift other things.
And the most hilariously, wonderfully, sadly unknown part of this is that when you do so, you end up with what you set out to achieve in the first place. The love and contentment and “success.” Only this time, your worth doesn’t depend on it. You aren’t a failure if you lose it one day. This all stems from self. ('Tis not the mountain man conquers, but himself.) So here is what you need to know.
Whenever there is a problem in your life, there is a problem with how you are thinking, reacting, or responding. Whatever you feel you are not receiving is a direct reflection of what you are not giving. Whatever you are angered by is what you aren’t willing to see in yourself.
So where you feel you are lacking, you must give. Where there is tension, you must unpack. If you want more recognition, recognize others. If you want love, be more loving. Give exactly what you want to get.
If you want to let go of something, build something new. If you don’t understand, ask. If you don’t like something, say so. If you want to change, start small. If you want something, ask for it. If you love someone, tell them. If you want to attract something, become it. If you enjoy something, let yourself feel it.
If you do anything compulsively, ask yourself why. Stop trying to curb your spending or change your diet or avoid that one person or lash out at innocent people you love. Look for the cause of the feeling (not just the feeling itself), and you’ll fix the problem for good.
If you miss somebody, call them. It is silly to suffer in silence. It is noble and humbling to tell someone that they matter to you, regardless of whether or not you matter to them.
If your life is missing something you cannot place back into it, restructure.
You will get nowhere dismantling the pieces with nothing to take their place. You’ll end up reassembling the parts of the old life you are trying to do away with. Step away and build anew. Anything new. You cannot expect to carry on with the same life you had without someone and not have that gaping hole torture you. Give yourself permission to build something beautiful. Something true.
If you want to be understood, explain. There is nothing we need more than people who are willing to kindly, gently, wholly, patiently explain to others.
If you want to be happy, choose it. Choose to be consciously, consistently grateful for something. Choose to immerse yourself in something beautiful and peaceful and joyous. If you can’t choose this, choose to start working
on figuring out what blocks you—be it health or circumstance or mindset.
Get help. Ask for it. Saying you can’t choose is giving up for good. (Don’t do that.)
Choose change. Your routine, your job, your city, your habits, your mindset. Never sit and fester in frustration. It does not matter whether or not you’re in the absolute worst-case scenario, complaining, worrying or being negative will never help. Anything. At all. Ever.
Everything you do, see, and feel is a reflection of not who you are, but how you are.
You create what you believe.
You see what you want.
You’ll have what you give.
50
HOW WE
LOSE OUR MINDS
to other
PEOPLE’S GODS
People allow accountants to map the blueprints of their lives.
Not their essential desires, their favorite philosophers, the ideas that induce visceral reactions and become beliefs. These things don’t provide a measure of what it takes to survive, a gauge on the things that have been pressed on us to seem enjoyable, so they are considered secondary.
An accountant can tell you how you can live and where. What opportunities will be open and not. How comfortably you can buy holiday gifts and fund your child’s education. We gauge our quality of life not by what or how much we do, but how we appear and what we earn from that doing.
We’re not quite at fault for this. Present-day monoculture, the governing pattern, the master narrative, the beliefs we accept without ever having consciously accepted them, tells us that if wealth and attractiveness and worldly possessions don’t make us feel high and alive, we just don’t have enough of them.
It makes sense on an initial level, but as anybody can tell you, acquiring another 0 at the end of the balance on your bank statement, or a variety of new things (that really just represent your perceived worth or lack thereof) only changes how much you have surrounding you, not how deeply or sincerely you can appreciate them, feel them, enjoy them, want them, be happy because of them.
If it takes more than the slightest bit of personal experience to attest to this, pluck from the endless, proverbial pile of research.
External acquisition does not yield internal contentment.
And yet we trek on. We are still enslaved to the things we are taught are ultimate “goods.” We justify our faith in the system by flawed and influenced logic. We continue to believe that something external can change our internal ability to be aware, to appreciate, to live, to feel.
Once we are initially convinced that not just money, but an idea of morality, education, and yes, general wealth, parlay into contentment, we become rats on a spinning wheel and we’ll spend the rest of our lives there if we aren’t careful.
If you’ve never heard of it before, we all seem to be suffering from a sort of Diderot Effect. Denis Diderot was a philosopher during the Enlightenment, author of the fictional essay “Regrets On Parting With My Old Dressing Gown.” As the story goes, he lived a very simple life and was happy until a friend gave him a gift, a gorgeous scarlet dressing gown. The more he wore his gown around his small apartment, the more the simplicity of his life seemed…out of place.
He then desired new furnishings, as one with a dressing gown as beautiful as his shouldn’t be living in a lowly home. He then wanted to replace his other clothes, his wall hangings, and so on. He wound up in debt and toiling his life away trying to maintain the glamour of his surroundings—an elusive, endless task.
Because modern, daily life keeps us consistently dipping our toes and dousing our senses in ads and “success stories” that are born of luxury and married to materialism, it is almost impossible to take a step back and see the system objectively. So most don’t.
I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a god so worshipped and adored as a dollar bill. Never so much faith put into systems designed to maintain power and serve the ego. The most insidiously effective governors are the ones that do not tell you they are controlling you, and they are the ones who have programmed your need to keep running on the wheel, staring at the illusory screen, thinking you’re heading to that end goal.
Behind the cage, what you cannot see is that the wheel you are running on endlessly powers their monopoly.
And because of this predisposed, collective mindset (that is very evidently not serving us) we believe in a variety of “goods.” Be educated. Be a “good person.” Have money. Be attractive. Work out. Have a great job. Buy a house. And onward.